Like an omen from the Book of Revelation, a wispy, silvery-blue noctilucent cloud hovered over Colorado late last month.

The timing couldn't have been more appropriate.

The cloud - the "miner's canary" of climate change, some call it - appears as global warming research is becoming a major scientific industry in fields ranging from atmospheric physics to biology.

Experts are increasingly convinced that carbon dioxide gas from the burning of fossil fuels is at least partly responsible for the marked warming of recent years.

And the warming is accelerating.

"Almost every climate model says the same thing. . . . In the next decade, we might see the same amount of warming that we saw over the last century," says ocean chemist Peter G. Brewer of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Monterey.

What will global warming bring? Fewer fish and icebergs? More rain and a damper Big Apple? In the diverse world of global warming research, the latest news includes:

*Californians can look for rainier weather, because average temperatures are expected to rise from 2 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit over the next 100 years.

That could be especially bad for Californians if, as climate models project, the sea level rises by one to three feet around North America. Heavier rain and higher seas would increase coastal damage during storms, like the El Nino-generated storms of recent years.

*The Pacific ecosystem, especially fish that benefit much of the West Coast economy, could be threatened by global warming, Bay Area researchers warn.

"There's lots of data showing there are big changes in marine ecosystems from the tropics to the poles," says biological oceanographer James P. Barry of the Monterey Bay Institute. For example, "if you look at the record from 1992 to now, there's just been a precipitous decline in salmon stocks - they're smaller and have less fat."

*An ominous absence of icebergs in the Grand Banks shipping lanes off Newfoundland might be an early warning sign of global warming, Science magazine reported July 2.

*New York City will suffer repeated flooding in the next century as global warming raises the sea level, soaking subways and turning parts of Brooklyn into wetlands, said a report issued jointly on June 29 by the Environmental Defense Fund and Columbia University.

Global warming might seem like an unreal issue to residents of Northern California: They are shivering through one of the chillier summers in long memory.

Indeed, the Northern California coast is likely to remain unusually cool through the summer, thanks to cold Pacific currents. So says the seasonal forecast by meteorologist Jim Wagner and his colleagues at the U.S. Climate Prediction Center in Camp Springs, Md.

The cold water is associated with La Nina following the warm-water El Nino of the winter of 1997-98, Wagner says.

Still, such short-term coolings can't obscure the long-term signal: It's getting warmer, all around the Earth.

New projections of global warming indicate it might be even slightly worse than originally foreseen. Previously, scientists expected an average planetary temperature rise of 1.4 to 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit over the next 100 years. Now they're looking at a rise of 2.3 to 7.2 degrees, says Tom Wigley, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder.

That 1-degree difference in projections might seem slight. In fact, it equals the entire amount of rise in average global temperature over the last century, Wigley says.

Now that hope is fading as nations establish tighter controls on sulfur dioxide emissions, Wigley says.

For that reason, slightly higher rates of warming and sea level rise related to warming are expected, according to a climate study written by Wigley and released June 29 by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change in Washington.

In the next century, the rates of rise in temperature and sea level might occur up to seven times as fast as in the 20th century, the Pew study adds.

Many computer models agree that the warming will continue into the 21st century. As a result, California will see

"When the world gets warmer, the oceans can evaporate more moisture and the atmosphere can hold more moisture - and it's got to come out somewhere." Wigley said. "The tricky thing is to figure out where." Climate models indicate California is one of those places, he says.

Computer models have indicated that global warming in the lower atmosphere would be accompanied by high-altitude cooling.

In 1994, Professor Gary Thomas of the University of Colorado at Boulder forecast that as the upper air cooled, beautiful noctilucent clouds - common in polar latitudes - would appear at southerly latitudes. The clouds are wispy and silvery-blue, composed of very small ice crystals. They resemble cirrus clouds, but are far higher, some 50 miles up.

Sure enough, on June 22, 50 miles in the sky over Boulder, a silver-bluish noctilucent cloud drifted overhead. It is the farthest south such a cloud has been recorded, Thomas says.

The southerly drift of noctilucent clouds may be the miner's canary of global warming - a signal of bad times ahead, he says. "What we're seeing are some dramatic (upper atmospheric cooling) effects that are far greater than what the models are predicting."

Yet the national response to global warming remains sluggish and divided, many scientists complain.

On June 28, Oechel and some 50 scientific colleagues assembled at the Congress to warn legislators.

"For too long, a vocal minority denying climate change has had the ear of Congress," said a member of the group, Richard Gammon, a professor of chemistry, oceanography and atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington. "We hope our presence today serves as a wake-up call on this important issue."

Some of the most disturbing recent research comes from the scientific sub-specialty of paleoclimatology. Its researchers exploit everything from antarctic ice cores to ancient pollen samples to determine how Earth's average temperature has fluctuated over the centuries.

"I used to believe that changes in climate happened slowly and would never affect me," geophysicist-hydrologist Kendrick Taylor of the Desert Research Institute in Reno writes in the current issue of American Scientist.

But he says his attitude changed profoundly when he and colleagues examined ice cores from Greenland - long tubes of ice, extracted from the polar ice and stored in refrigerators. By analyzing the cores' chemical constituents, they and others concluded that in prehistoric times, the planet's climate repeatedly underwent rapid changes - sometimes in less than a decade, shorter than the span of the TV show "Seinfeld."

Based on the research, "now I know that our climate could change significantly in my lifetime," says Taylor, now chief scientist for an ice-core analysis program run by the National Science Foundation.

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen markedly - as has Earth's average temperature. A growing number of scientists blame the former for the latter.

"I have certainly become more convinced that there is not only a human influence on climate - one that will accelerate in the future - but also that the magnitude of that influence is not small," Wigley said.

In the long run, some scientists say, humanity might dispose of atmospheric carbon dioxide by dumping it on the ocean floor. In theory, carbon dioxide from power plants could be collected and liquefied, then shipped to the ocean and dumped thousands of feet deep on the ocean floor.

Down there, in the eternal darkness, the gas theoretically would remain indefinitely, prevented from escaping to the surface by the crushing pressure of the overlying water.

Would carbon dioxide dumping work? Brewer of the Monterey Bay Institute and his colleagues from Stanford took a beaker of liquefied carbon dioxide and lowered it to the Pacific floor, 2 miles deep.

Observing via remote TV camera, they noted that "slushy ice began to form in the bottom of our beaker." Then blobs of the carbon dioxide spilled onto the seafloor and rolled away, out of camera range.

Might the gas harm the undersea ecosystem? That's the subject of experiments planned for next year.

During the last experiment, "a fish came by and thought of eating (a carbon dioxide blob)," Brewer recalls. As the fish "sniffed" it, though, the creature briefly behaved erratically - in Brewer's words, "it got a bit loopy." &lt;